Colonial and Postcolonial Histories: comparative reflections on the legacies of empire

human development, culture

In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century

Also CSST Working Paper #121.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51312/1/548.pd

From little king to landlord: property, law and the gift under permanent settlement

This paper concerns the set of issues surrounding the imposition in south India of a Permanent Settlement in 1803 for the local "nobility" -- the "ancient zamindars and polygars." I focus here on the "little kings" themselves, their transformation into "landlords", and the implications of the new political economy for the old political logic in which law, property, and the state were linked in very different ways. I look in particular at the problems concerning "alienation" under the Permanent Settlement, the fact that landlords, in contravention of the principles of profit and management, continued to make gifts of land. I conclude by examining the implications of my narratives for a consideration of colonial state and society, with respect in particular to the praxis of culture and the discourse of law. I demonstrate that all colonial transformations were, for inherent structural reasons, incompletely realized

The Invention of Caste: Civil Society in Colonial India

Also CSST Working Paper #11.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51136/1/368.pd

The Original Caste: Power, History, and Hierarchy in South Asia

Also CSST Working Paper #10.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51135/1/367.pd

The pasts of a Pālaiyakārar : the ethnohistory of a south Indian little king

This paper examines a text which is the family history of a line of south Indian "little kings," or pālaiyakārars. Beginning with a discussion of different modes of history, I analyze this text as both a statement of a particular history and a cultural representation of a more general modality of history. As a particular history, this text enables me to talk about conceptions of royal appropriateness and sovereignty, of political relations, and of kingly privileges; as a cultural form the text provides clues about the relations of these cultural conceptions to a structural form of narrative emplotment with all its underlying assumptions about time, causation, and process. Finally, I consider how a hermeneutical exercise of this sort is very important for Western analysts who wish to reconstruct the "history" of south Indian politics

Ritual and Resistance: Subversion as a Social Fact

Also CSST Working Paper #16.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51143/1/375.pd

Culture/Power/History: Series Prospectus

Also CSST Working Paper #23.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51154/1/386.pd

Constrained Multistate Sequence Design for Nucleic Acid Reaction Pathway Engineering

We describe a framework for designing the sequences of multiple nucleic acid strands intended to hybridize in solution via a prescribed reaction pathway. Sequence design is formulated as a multistate optimization problem using a set of target test tubes to represent reactant, intermediate, and product states of the system, as well as to model crosstalk between components. Each target test tube contains a set of desired “on-target” complexes, each with a target secondary structure and target concentration, and a set of undesired “off-target” complexes, each with vanishing target concentration. Optimization of the equilibrium ensemble properties of the target test tubes implements both a positive design paradigm, explicitly designing for on-pathway elementary steps, and a negative design paradigm, explicitly designing against off-pathway crosstalk. Sequence design is performed subject to diverse user-specified sequence constraints including composition constraints, complementarity constraints, pattern prevention constraints, and biological constraints. Constrained multistate sequence design facilitates nucleic acid reaction pathway engineering for diverse applications in molecular programming and synthetic biology. Design jobs can be run online via the NUPACK web application